Telephones equipped with electronic personal telephone directories for storing the name, number and other reference information of frequently called contacts have become commonplace in both mobile cellular applications and in wired residential and business applications. Typically, speech recognition, soft keys, or touch screen interfaces are used to dial a phone number selected from a list stored electronically in a personal directory. In existing systems, the user must create and administer their personal directory manually. This is accomplished by manually keying in a telephone number of a new entry. The user may also be required or provided the option to key in the text of the name corresponding to the number entered and other personal information such as location (home, office, cell, etc.)
Some systems have the added feature of being speech recognition driven. In such systems, the user simply states the name of the party to be called, and the system performs speech recognition to correlate the spoken name with a speech template stored in association with the directory number of the party to be called. These systems are typically user-trained. The user must train the speech recognizer with two or three examples of an utterance to be associated with each directory number entered. With personal directories supporting on the order of 50 entries or more, the creation of a personal directory can be time consuming and tedious.